Disqus - Latest Comments for etherjammer

Re: Don’t Stick It In Their Mouth – How to ReTweet

etherjammer — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:45:52 -0000

I use "via" in two circumstances:

* When I'm retweeting something that someone else has already retweeted, I'll add via at the end (and generally remove their comments). I tend to do this only if I already follow the person who's been retweeted in the first place. Example:

unmarketing: I love the comments after the article RT @summerjoy: Making sure your branded content doesn't suck. http://tiny.cc/wqJsA
etherjammer: RT @summerjoy: Making sure your branded content doesn't suck. http://tiny.cc/wqJsA (via @unmarketing)

(I follow @summerjoy, so the tweet would have appeared in my stream; but I didn't see it, thanks to the volume of people I follow, until @unmarketing retweeted it. So I retweet the original and give credit for the notice to Scott.)

OR

* I'm tweeting a link that I got from someone else, but not their commentary - or I got it from them in a non-Twitter context. It's not a retweet, but I still want to show my work. Example:

etherjammer: The History of Hip-Hop in Five Minutes by Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer: http://bit.ly/103bB5 (via @havi)

(I got the link from Havi's blog, not Twitter, so I can't exactly retweet it! But I still want to give her credit for the discovery.)

Does that help? I know at least the first probably sounds a little confusing - I hope I explained it well enough.

Re: Best in Slot - Holy Priest

etherjammer — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:58:40 -0000

Sure enough. It's on my handwritten list but I forgot to type it in. Not that it matters anymore; this list is obsolete anyway.

Re: Panlinkticon 5/21/09: The Late Late Late Show

etherjammer — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:08:57 -0000

I didn't realize that I didn't have you in my feed list! You're added now. :)

Re: Why We Shield

etherjammer — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:34:21 -0000

Ha, of course you're right. I just moused over the talent in Wowhead's talent sheet - forgot to account for multiple points in it. :) Corrected in the post!

Re: Just for the record

etherjammer — Fri, 08 May 2009 09:44:26 -0000

Do you need it? Certainly not. I tend to prefer it but that's because my approach to healing is focused on quick, light healing.

433 is the amount of Haste Rating you need to hit the haste soft cap (50%), where the GCD is reduced to its minimum of 1.0s, when Borrowed Time and Enlightenment are active. Haste is multiplicative (although haste rating is additive), and each value you're multiplying is (100+Haste bonus)/100; Borrowed Time's 25% haste contributes 1.25 to the function. So when Borrowed Time and Enlightenment are active, you have a base of 1.25*1.06 = 1.325, or 32.5%, haste. Dividing 1.50 (the soft cap) by 1.325 (since Haste is multiplicative, not additive) gives you 1.132, or 13.2%, that you need to make up in Haste Rating. At 32.79 HR per 1% haste, that's 432.8 HR - 433 rounding up, since you can't get fractional HR.

As for raid buffs, I prefer strongly to avoid making gear and healing decisions based on raid composition. Anything beyond what I can do myself is a pleasant added bonus, but not something I can rely on. Food buffs can get you an additional 40 HR, and if you're willing to forego a flask, Elixir of Lightning Speed will get you another 45 HR, which is about 2.6% haste between them. And yes, the Egg procs help get up there, but like class buffs they're unreliable, and you'll eventually want to upgrade past the Egg.

Does that all make sense?

Re: A quick update

etherjammer — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:46:49 -0000

Too much haste, I think, doesn't start to become a problem until you hit diminishing returns - I'm not sure what that point is. Penance, for instance, will continue to benefit from haste long after the soft cap - I think you need to hit 3279 Haste Rating (less with Borrowed Time and Enlightenment) to reach 1.0s on Penance, and even more (6500+) to get Greater Heal down that far.

Still, most of our spells as Discipline priests will be short casts, like Flash Heal, or instants, and the limit of their benefit from haste is 433 Haste Rating. (More haste will lower the casting time of, say, Flash Heal, but that's of little benefit when you can only cast once per second.)

Fortunately, we can get a lot of benefit from the Ulduar gear that's nominally DPS gear. It tends to have crit rather than haste, and so if you reach the haste cap (as you apparently have), you can trade out some of that haste gear for crit gear, as long as you keep it above 433!

Incidentally, it may also be useful to know that when channeled spells are affected by haste, they have the same number of ticks divided evenly across the hasted cast time. So Divine Hymn, for example, normally ticks every 2 seconds for 8 seconds; at my 425 haste, it ticks every 1.67s for 6.68s; and with Borrowed Time up, it's every 1.34s for 5.34s.

Re: Math is hard

etherjammer — Wed, 06 May 2009 06:53:42 -0000

I didn't mean to imply that it was hard! :) Just that I've been going around thinking that pretty much all I needed was the buff food, and that's not right. :)

As for Borrowed Time, see above; my experience and the tooltip bear out BT's affecting the global cooldown.

Re: Math is hard

etherjammer — Wed, 06 May 2009 06:52:28 -0000

In my experience, yes, it does. The tooltip is pretty explicit, too: it grants 25% spell haste, not a 25% cast time reduction or something else that sounds like spell haste but has a slightly different meaning.

Re: When to Shield

etherjammer — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:57:59 -0000

I know! I am weeping bitter, bitter tears of anguish. We're also getting nerfed on Divine Hymn and Glyph of Mass Dispel. "Wait, we made Discipline priests worth playing? Better fix that."

In seriousness, though, 15% is still better than nothing, and we still get the 1-second cooldown, so I'm not entirely distraught. :)

Re: More on PW:S and speed healing

etherjammer — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:32:23 -0000

Hi Tom,

The developers said early on in the patch cycle that one of the planned features of 3.1 was that rage generation would continue through Power Word: Shield; they confirmed, much closer to the release date, that the feature would be in 3.1. (Unfortunately, I don't have references for either.) However, it doesn't appear to have made it into the official patch notes or the unannounced changes, and so I'm not sure if the change actually made it to live WOW.

I'll do some more checking and see what I can find out.

-Chris

Re: Divine Aegis: an update

etherjammer — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:42:45 -0000

I was killin' rhinos in Borean Tundra, actually. (I forgot to do yesterday's cooking daily, which was Mustard Dogs!, so I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone.) I was tagging the small rhinos (which do low enough damage that they wouldn't just blow away a DA) with a low-damage attack (usually my wand), then letting them attack and just healing myself. I had haste and crit buffs going so I could cast faster and increase my chances of getting the DA proc, and I kept track of how much the DA absorbed. (I actually managed to get one DA up to about 7k total absorption before it went away!)

Does that help?

Re: A quick thought (and question) on Divine Aegis in 3.1

etherjammer — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 09:31:15 -0000

Marvel, if you happen to check back, I promise I haven't deleted your comment! I can see it on the WordPress dashboard, but Disqus isn't delivering the comment to this page.

To respond: on the live servers, no, Divine Aegis doesn't take overhealing into account. According to the patch notes, that's been changed in 3.1: DA will now take effect based on total healing, not effective healing. However, Matt's tests on the PTR have been inconclusive; he hasn't seen DA proc when he casts on himself at full health. No idea whether that's a cast-on-self issue or a not-proccing-on-overhealing issue.

Re: A quick thought (and question) on Divine Aegis in 3.1

etherjammer — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:04:36 -0000

Thanks for commenting, Khaeli. :)

That's a fair point - for some reason I'd misremembered DA as shielding for 50% of the healing done, not 30%. The lower number makes it much harder to reach the 10k cap, although I don't know what healing numbers for T8+ look like. I'm less reluctant to construct hypothetical scenarios, but since I don't have all the details it's hard to do so anyway. :)

Re: A quick thought (and question) on Divine Aegis in 3.1

etherjammer — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:15:02 -0000

Well, the "aren't useful" bit was before it occurred to me that they might still refresh the duration. :) But in fairness, your scenario involves a single Discipline priest healing the target. What if you have two or three? DA could stack rapidly in that scenario.

You're right that this is a direct buff to Penance. I agree 100% with you there. :) I'm also in agreement that if a shield stays up for very long, the encounter's not that hard to begin with. ;)

What worries me is that this is going to be used as fodder for the "Discipline priests are only single-target healers" argument. Although it's a counter-productive attitude to have, I know I'm not the only Discipline priest who's hesitated to heal a target with DA up because "what if I crit and I waste my DA?". I know it's silly, but from my discussions with other healers it's far from uncommon, and this buff to DA removes that moment of consideration; even if my DA doesn't add to the amount absorbed, it does add to the duration of the shield.

Anyway, I guess the bottom line is that you've answered my question and given me some things to think about. Thank you!

Re: New site icon

etherjammer — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:31:50 -0000

It's meant to be the sigil that lights up on Draenei's foreheads when they use Gift of the Naaru. Clearly that's not coming through. ;)

Re: Discipline priests: haste is better than crit

etherjammer — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:50:31 -0000

Thanks for clarifying that. Many of the tools that I use date back to BC, and I haven't found good replacements for them for Wrath (assuming that they need to be replaced!), so I honestly wasn't sure of the stat weights.

You're almost certainly right that some +crit and some +haste is better than either extreme. I didn't intend to imply that Discipline priests should want gear that was all +haste all the time; my post was really a reaction to the Discipline priest guides I've seen that claim that the best strategy is to stack +crit as high as you can, with +haste as a spackle to fill in the itemization gaps. I think that attitude is contributing to a lot of misconceptions about Discipline priests, and I'm trying to correct it.

Like I said, I'm not actually finished with this idea yet, but I've been buried by work and Real Life and haven't had a chance to work out the kinks in it.

Re: Discipline priests: haste is better than crit

etherjammer — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:45:18 -0000

Alarric, thanks for commenting. It seems like the switch to Disqus wiped out the previous comment thread, which is a shame, because I already addressed this there. ;)

I'm aware that this isn't a realistic scenario or Discipline priests. The goal here was not to say that I think Discipline priests should just spam Flash Heal (I agree with you that that's ridiculous) but to provide a baseline for raw throughput.

I actually am not finished with the train of thought that I started in this series of posts, but I've been weighed down recently with work and Real Life, and I haven't had a chance to move on to the next station, so to speak. In short, though, my ideal Discipline priest strategy is to mitigate as much damage as possible with Power Word: Shield (in order to keep Borrowed Time up) and to supplant that mitigation with Divine Aegis (which now takes into account overhealing and will stack - which might cause some interesting confusion for mitigation meters - but which has a maximum mitigation). Penance is a big part of that plan as well. But like I said, I haven't finalized it yet, which is why I haven't posted more about it. :)

I hope that helps with your understanding of this post!

Re: When to heal the DPS

etherjammer — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:42:45 -0000

Aw, I liked your flowchart! Heck, you were the one who inspired me to make this one.

Re: When to heal the DPS

etherjammer — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:42:09 -0000

/laugh!

Yeah, that's a typo. Notice that the diamond above it has "No" and "No". ;) I switched their positions at one point, and forgot to switch the follow-arrows when I switched back.

It's fixed now. :)

Re: When to heal the DPS

etherjammer — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:41:45 -0000

That's about what this flowchart boils down to. :) It's funnier if it's longer, though. ;)

Re: Discipline priests: haste is better than crit

etherjammer — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:17:58 -0000

Thanks for the comment. I'm actually not finished with the train of thought I started in this post, for just the reasons you specify - there is something to be said for crit, and between talents and Borrowed Time, there is a haste cap that can be reached easily with current gear. (I've also been convinced in other comments that Intellect is probably a better investment than MP5.)

Do you mind if I ask where you got the item budget values for haste and crit? The table I was looking at valued them about the same.

Re: Plurk me, Parse me

etherjammer — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:36:49 -0000

"What happens if you type says or wishes though? You get the plurk version just as if you’d selected it."

This actually gets obnoxious in one case: you can't start a freestyle question with "Is". Otherwise, yeah, the plurk parsing is pretty nifty. I just wish the markup would eat the asterisks and underlines...

Re: louisgray.com: Take FriendFeed Mobile With FF To Go

etherjammer — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:34:13 -0000

Looks fine now, Benjamin. Thank you!

Re: louisgray.com: Take FriendFeed Mobile With FF To Go

etherjammer — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:23:14 -0000

Nor on my Blackberry 8830 World - or, honestly, in Firefox 2 on OS X. Like tad above, I keep cycling back to the login screen in both browsers; I've reset my remote key several times to no avail.

Benjamin, some more information when a login fails would be nice - without that reporting, I can't tell what I'm doing wrong, and without that I can't fix the problem.

Re: The Great Internet Twit-Out. I don't get it. | iSeanReiser

etherjammer — Thu, 15 May 2008 03:19:53 -0000

Ah, reply depth limiters.

I can see that argument. On the other hand, they haven't yet: and while we'd like to see Twitter be the Perfect Application, we also need a way to deal with the downtime until it is the perfect application. ;)

Another thought: if you must boycott, could you rig a script to tweet "Twitter, please upgrade your infrastructure to avoid future downtime!" or something like that, every half hour or so? That way you're getting the message across without a bunch of people nudging you. ;)